Qantas NZ pays NZ$4000 compensation

[Mwenenzi]

NZ civil court.. If only AU consumer laws and courts had the same attitude

Rnz.co.nz from NZ Herald --> Qantas ticket errors: Customers pay three times for flights, wait four months for refund
27 Jan 'Very poor service': Qantas must pay $4000 for triple ticket blunders

The phone call to the NZ QF phone number, may have been redirected to QF call centre in South Africa.

Two frustrated Qantas passengers were forced to pay for their flights three times because of system errors, missing payments and the issuing of tickets with the wrong travel dates. To make matters worse, their luggage didn't arrive on time with them when they landed and it took four months for the airline to refund for the ticket issue.

Now, Qantas has been ordered to pay Nikki Bohlmann and Leesa Jackson more than $4000 in compensation for the "very poor service" they received.

On 5 May, 2022, Bohlmann and Jackson paid $7246 for premium economy return flights to South Africa with Qantas but, because of an error, the airline failed to issue the tickets. After calling the call centre, they rebooked the flights but were told a systems error had occurred and their payment had not been received.

The passengers were told to pay a third time to rebook the flights, but when this set of flights finally went through, they were issued with an incorrect return date that was out by a month.
<snip>
Although the airline said it would refund the clients for the previous flights they had paid for that had not been issued, the money took four months to be returned.

Bohlmann and Jackson recently took Qantas to the Civil Court to claim $18,000 for compensation, loss of income and expenses incurred.
<snip>
Although Qantas admitted they were at fault, Paton-Simpson said the passengers were entitled to compensation for stress and inconvenience for the poor service. “I consider the standard of service offered in the booking process very poor in multiple respects. “There is no doubt that the passengers were majorly inconvenienced by the airline’s poor service. They were forced to take extra holidays at a time that was not their choosing and they provided evidence they had spent a total of more than 14 hours on the phone to the airline.”

Qantas was ordered to pay Bohlmann and Jackson $4426

Edit
Looking more at the person who made ruling, So Disputes Tribunal (Ministry of Justice) rather than a court. Still looking for ruling on NZ Govt web site

Statutory officer
New Zealand Ministry of Justice
Oct 2013 - Present 10 years 4 months
Judicial officer involved in adjudication and dispute resolution. Mentor, member of Best Practice Committee and Education Committee. I have given presentations at national and regional training on the topics of penalty clauses, damages for breach of contract, mitigation, incorporation and interpretation of written terms, Covid-19 and frustration of contracts. I have been involved in reviewing decisions for publication.

 

[Captain Halliday]

$4,426 for 14 hours on the phone to Qantas.

That's $316 per hour.

Quick back of the envelope calculation... carry the 1..

Yep, I think I'm out $49,612 for last calendar year alone.

 

[encryptededdy]

This isn't even the usual Qantas operational issues etc. It sounds like it's purely their completely incompetent call centers costing them $4000. Maybe one day they're realise that their poor call center outsourcing attempt is costing them more than it's saving.

I have no idea how their call center staff could think that the best way to resolve this situation is to get the customer to pay for the flights again (twice!), instead of contacting back office/accounting/ticketing etc. to get the problem resolved properly. In my experience the Qantas call center staff seem to never escalate an issue if they're unsure, and just start spewing incorrect information instead.

 

[L2.]

I have no idea how their call center staff could think that the best way to resolve this situation is to get the customer to pay for the flights again (twice!), instead of contacting back office/accounting/ticketing etc. to get the problem resolved properly. In my experience the Qantas call center staff seem to never escalate an issue if they're unsure, and just start spewing incorrect information instead.

The majority of agents working in contact centres have little interest in actually achieving a desirable outcome for the customer, their sole aim as soon as a call drops in is for that call to be over as soon as possible.

The majority of businesses don't really have any interest about what goes on in their contact centres, other than how much (or little) they're spending to run them, and their KPI performance.

And thirdly, there's a significant proportion of people who call that could have answered their own question by reading the FAQ on the website of [insert business they're calling], meaning many agents seem to treat everybody calling as if they're in that category, and many businesses assume that most people calling are in that category as well, which is why that so much investment goes into IVR systems to prevent you from being connected to an actual human.

Unfortunately this all means that if you call most major companies, all they care about is that your call is answered by a warm body within their 1 minute 29 second target, that your call is over within their 4 minute 29 second target, and that your agent spent less than their 59 second target on "after call work" (e.g. sending an escalation or leaving notes on your file).

So it's ultimately more beneficial both to the contact centre's KPIs and to the agent, for them to read you a mouthful of useless information from the FAQ that you already read yourself before calling, or to make up some nonsense and/or provide a false promise to get you off the phone, than it would be for them to understand the issue and escalate it appropriately.

I don't find that Australian v.s. overseas call centres are better or worse by default with this kind of thing. It all comes down to the individual company and their management - and unfortunately our main two airlines are both hopeless.